SEO key tips for a growing business

Confusion is a common issue facing digital content marketers — and we want to help. In this post, we'll cover how to optimize your blog posts for the keywords you care about, along with a few other optimization tactics you should keep in mind.

1. Focus on 1–2 long-tail keywords that match the intent of your target reader
2. Include your 1–2 keywords in specific parts of your post.
3. Make sure your blog is mobile-friendly and responsive.
4. Optimize your meta description, and use all the space.
5. Optimize your images with image alt text.
6. Don't use too many similar topic tags.
7. Use URL structures that help your visitors.
8. Link internally when possible.
9. Use Google's Search Console.
10. Use topic clusters.
11. Create evergreen content.
12. Repurpose or update your current content and remove outdated content.

Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts your SEO because search engines consider this keyword stuffing (i.e., including keywords as much as possible with the sole purpose of ranking highly in organic search).

It also doesn't make for a good reader experience — a ranking factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure you're answering the intent of your visitors. Therefore, you should use keywords in your content in a way that doesn't feel unnatural or forced.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two long-tail SEO keywords per blog post. While you can use more than one keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing for just one or two keywords.

You may be wondering: Why long-tail keywords?

These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. For example, the long-tail keyword "how to write a blog post" is much more impactful in terms of SEO than the short keyword "blog post".

Website visitors searching long-tail keywords are more likely to read the whole post and then seek more information from you. In other words, they'll help you generate right type of traffic — visitors who convert.